X-Men review: six players, two screens and a lot of Sentinels

Six joysticks in a row. Two screens joined into one long picture. Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Dazzler lined up across the front of a cabinet so wide it looked like furniture.

What does a sixth player change?

Up to six players control the X-Men against Magneto, and the six-player version uses two screens in a deluxe cabinet, one of them reflected by a mirror, to make a single double-wide picture. That is the headline, and it is not a gimmick. Once the screen is that wide, the fight is that wide too. Players spread out, cover different lanes, and yell across the cabinet at each other like a team calling plays.

The game itself is deliberately simple: move, punch, jump, and a separate button for your mutant power. Everything else is the crowd on the screen, an army of Sentinels and villains like Juggernaut coming at six heroes at once.

Some cabinets are games. A few are places, and a six player machine is a place.

Powers that cost you something

The one real decision is the mutant power button. Each character has a unique power that can wipe out multiple enemies, but using it costs you health. So the move that saves the team also brings you closer to needing another quarter. It is a tidy design for an arcade: dramatic, readable from the back of the crowd, and quietly expensive.

The script became part of the fun. The game shipped with lines like "I am Magneto, master of magnet!" and "Welcome to die!", and generations of players have been quoting them ever since, with love.

What it meant back then

In the United States, X-Men was the top-grossing deluxe arcade cabinet on the RePlay charts for months of 1992, and one of the top five highest-grossing dedicated arcade games of 1992. The character designs came from the Pryde of the X-Men animated pilot, and for comic book kids at the mall arcade, seeing Nightcrawler and Dazzler on a screen that big was a small miracle.

The six player cabinet was always at the bigger arcades and family fun centers, rarely at the corner pizza place, because it simply did not fit. Finding a full row of six strangers playing together was one of the great sights of that era.

Playing it today

Alone, it is a thin and repetitive brawler, and there is no point pretending otherwise. With a group, it is still a riot. Fill as many spots as you can, save the powers for the Sentinels, and say the Magneto line out loud. Everyone does.